Copyright 1999 The Washington Post The Washington
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March 27, 1999, Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A06
LENGTH: 385 words
HEADLINE:
First Nuclear Dump Opens in N.M.
DATELINE: CARLSBAD, N.M., March 26
BODY: After 25 years of lawsuits, studies and
protests, the nation's first nuclear dump -- a network of chambers carved
out of the salt beds deep beneath the New Mexico desert -- today received its
first truckload of radioactive waste.
A crowd of about
100 people who live in Carlsbad, 25 miles from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,
cheered the truck and held up cardboard signs reading, "Welcome finally" and
"It's about time!" as the rig rolled through before daybreak.
Earlier in the 270-mile, 7 1/2-hour trip, the truck faced a scattering
of protesters yelling "Poison! Poison!" along with two young women who sat down
in the road and a driver who tried to block the highway.
The first load of waste came from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the
New Mexico city that was the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Ultimately, up to 6.2 million cubic feet of waste generated since the
dawn of the atomic age will be entombed over the next 30 years in the salt beds
nearly a half-mile below ground. The waste consists of such items as clothing,
tools and rags contaminated with plutonium.
Until now,
the United States has had no permanent site for weapons-related plutonium waste.
Waste has been piling up at 23 weapons installations around the country such as
Rocky Flats near Denver and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, where it
is kept mostly in 55-gallon drums on above-ground concrete pads, underneath
bubble structures or in earthen mounds.
These corroding
drums must be periodically repackaged, and some fear the waste is vulnerable to
hazards such as tornadoes or earthquakes.
The arrival
of the first shipment of waste at WIPP marked more than two decades of effort to
open the $ 1.8 billion repository, first proposed in 1974. The first
truckload will be placed underground by Monday.
"I'm
ecstatic -- this is just the culmination of everything I've worked for for 25
years," said Wendell Weart, a Sandia National Laboratories scientist who was
instrumental in creating the repository.
WIPP is
not designed for the thousands of tons of high-level waste stored at
nuclear power plants across the country. Yucca Mountain in Nevada is
being studied as a long-term burial place for that waste. First truckload rolls
into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant from Los Alamos.
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